Falah Berek peers through the slanted shutters of an upstairs bedroom window in his Rafah home as armoured Israeli bulldozers demolish his neighbour's greenhouses some 300 metres away, writes Nuala Haughey
"They are harvesting it," exclaims the pretty four-year-old boy, standing on his tiptoes on a low bed early yesterday morning and pointing at the rows of white plastic structures planted with onions, tomatoes and cucumbers.
But they weren't. They were razing it, the bulldozer's blade slowly biting into the sheeting and grinding the crops into the sandy soil. On the road nearby, another bulldozer was busy gouging the tarmac. For the moment, though, the Bereks' four greenhouses were untouched.
Falah's two-storey house is on the outskirts of the Tel Sultan neighbourhood of Rafah in southern Gaza, whose 25,000 residents have been besieged by the Israeli army since early last Tuesday. On Thursday night, Israeli troops punched a large hole in the wall of their relatives' neighbouring house, but so far theirs had been spared.
Falah's father Faiz (56), a lanky man with deep lines scored into his face, says the family is living in fear of the troops, but will stay in the house. "We have no other place to go, and dying here is better than leaving."
The invasion of Tel Sultan marked the start of the Israel's Operation Rainbow, which to date has claimed the lives of at least 42 Palestinians: men and boys, militants and innocents. Some were shot during helicopter air strikes, others by tank missiles or snipers. Ten were wiped out in one go in an army strike on Wednesday, during a peaceful demonstration. Hundreds of houses have been demolished and thousands left homeless as troops encroached on different neighbourhoods of the Rafah refugee camp, home to about 90,000 people.
Each day of Operation Rainbow brought distressing sights and new tales of human suffering. There was the ambulance driver who opened the rear of his vehicle outside Rafah's Abu Yousef Al Najar Hospital on Tuesday to find the body of his dead brother.
There was the sweet-faced boy, his left arm almost totally severed at the shoulder in Wednesday's rally attack, who pleaded with surgeons before he passed away: "Please, help me doctor. I don't want to die."
There was the 58-year-old man who broke down on Thursday as he recounted how his house in the Brazil refugee camp neighbourhood had just been bulldozed before his eyes, and he did not know where his nine daughters and wife were.
Israel says its operation is designed purely to flush out militants, gather intelligence and destroy tunnels beneath houses which are used to smuggle weapons and goods from neighbouring Egypt. But people here link it to the deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers in three incidents on the Gaza Strip last week. Seven of these soldiers were killed by Palestinians in or near Rafah.
Whether it is about fighting terrorism or collective punishment, one thing is for sure: this week Israel, with its largest incursion in Gaza for years, showed the people of Rafah and its adjacent refugee camps that it is the boss.
The home-made rockets and improvised bombs of the hooded militants who lurk in Rafah's alleyways once darkness falls are no match for the military might of Israel with its high-tech, US-manufactured weapons.
Why, asks Rafah's mayor, Saeed Zuroub, in his raspy voice, when world technology can detect petroleum deep in the ground, must the Israeli army demolish houses in search of crudely dug smuggling tunnels? "Why," screams a furious local politician at a US journalist, "is my blood cheap but yours not?"
Rafah town and its surrounding refugee camp is a ramshackle conglomeration of shoddily built cinder-block houses, its dusty streets choked with festering rubbish. It is home to almost 150,000 Palestinians, more than half of them registered as refugees from the war of independence which followed the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.
The old people here can tell you the long-forgotten Arabic names of their ancestral villages, now in Israel. Many young people here have never been outside the squalid environs of the tiny Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated parts of the world and home to some 1.3 million stateless Palestinians.
Rafah is one of the poorest places in the occupied Palestinian territories, with agriculture providing the main source of income for many. Like border towns in many parts of the world, there is a healthy trade in smuggling. In addition to weapons, cigarettes and even medicines are brought from Egypt.
Since the outbreak of the current Palestinian intifada or uprising against Israeli occupation in September 2001, Israel has been tearing down houses in Rafah's refugee camp to extend its border buffer zone, called the Philadelphia Road. Some 1,800 homes have been demolished in the camp since then, according to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, which says such massive destruction of civilian property is illegal.
It is here that Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist, was killed in March 2003, crushed beneath an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) bulldozer as she tried to prevent house demolitions.
The demolitions of the past week began in Block O of the camp, which is one of the parts closest to the Egyptian border. People living there hastily loaded their belongings on to donkey-drawn carts and fled to relatives' homes in other neighbourhoods further from the border, which they thought would be safer. One of these was Tel Sultan, which was subsequently sealed off by Israeli army tanks and placed under curfew on Tuesday.
As the Israeli army withdrew from two neighbourhoods yesterday and announced that it was redeploying its troops, people slowly drifted back on to the streets and went to inspect the remains of their collapsed homes. The sounds of rousing funeral speeches mingled with the almost constant buzz overhead of drone aircraft and helicopter gunships, as well as sporadic cracks of gunfire in neighbourhoods that were still occupied.
Back at little Falah's house at the entrance to Tel Sultan, relief trucks with food supplies are waiting to enter the area at lunchtime. In front of them stand two tanks, and the bulldozers are parked off the road among the wreckage of greenhouses. Since early morning, they have been hard at work, flattening more greenhouses, including those belonging to the Berek family.
An Israeli army spokesman says there has been firing in the area and the greenhouses prevented soldiers from seeing where the shooting was coming from. "It was a dangerous situation so they decided to raze the hothouses."
Falah's brother Isam (22), had looked on as the family's only source of income was demolished; four large greenhouses with herbs, watermelons and vegetables.
"Tomorrow they might advance a bit more," says Isam. "And then you'll be coming here looking for my house and asking people what happened to me."